Ellen Raskin Books in Order

If you want the classic puzzle mystery: The Westing Game
If you want a quirky family novel: Figgs & Phantoms → The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon → The Tattooed Potato and Other Clues
If you want her best picture-book jokes: Nothing Ever Happens On My Block → Spectacles → Ghost in a Four-Room Apartment
If you want playful animal wordplay: Who, Said Sue, Said Whoo? → Moose, Goose and Little Nobody → Twenty-two Twenty-three

Ellen Raskin was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on March 13, 1928, and grew up there during the Depression. That background stayed with her. Her books are full of close observation, neighborhood detail, family clutter, and the sense that something surprising might be hiding inside an ordinary day.

At seventeen she entered the University of Wisconsin-Madison planning to study journalism. Then she visited a major modern art exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, was jolted by what she saw, and changed her major to fine art. That turn toward drawing, design, and visual problem-solving shaped everything she made afterward.

She started as an artist, not a novelist.

After college she married, had a daughter, moved to New York City, and learned the practical side of printing and layout in a commercial art studio. Later she freelanced, experimented with typography, illustrated for magazines, and designed more than 1,000 book jackets. One of the best known is the original jacket for A Wrinkle in Time, but jacket work was only part of the education. She was learning how books work as objects, page by page.

After about fifteen years of illustrating other people's ideas, she wanted to build books of her own. Her first solo children's book, Nothing Ever Happens On My Block, appeared in 1966 and already showed her favorite trick: letting the reader see what a character misses. She kept writing and illustrating picture books such as Spectacles, Ghost in a Four-Room Apartment, and And It Rained, books that turn weak eyesight, rainy afternoons, and noisy apartments into carefully staged jokes.

Those early books explain a lot about why readers like her. The pictures do part of the storytelling, the humor often lives in the gap between words and images, and the endings usually come from a shift in perspective instead of a tidy speech about the lesson.

Then the mysteries got bigger.

In her novels, Raskin brought the same visual wit to clues, names, structure, and pacing. The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel) spins a missing-person case out of half-heard words and nonsense that slowly makes sense. Figgs & Phantoms, a Newbery Honor Book, follows Mona Lisa Figg Newton through a family of performers and true eccentrics, mixing comedy with grief, books, and the search for belonging. The Tattooed Potato and Other Clues sends art student Dickory Dock into a tangle of aliases, artists, and neighborhood cases.

Her best-known book is The Westing Game. Published in 1978, it gathers sixteen heirs, a dead millionaire, and a very strange will, then turns the whole thing into a puzzle readers can try to solve alongside Turtle Wexler and the other tenants of Sunset Towers. It won the 1979 Newbery Medal, but the reason people keep handing it to new readers is simpler: it is funny, busy, surprising, and packed with memorable people.

Across her work, certain habits keep returning. Things are rarely what they first seem. Names matter. So do apartment buildings, city blocks, odd relatives, performers, artists, and children who notice more than adults expect. Even in her silliest books, she liked hidden patterns, wordplay, disguises, and the feeling that the book itself is part of the joke.

Raskin lived in New York for much of her adult life and kept making books until her death there on August 8, 1984, from a connective-tissue disease. She was fifty-six. The shelf she left behind is not large, but it is easy to spot: brainy, funny, a little strange, and always asking the reader to look again.